An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.
If you're a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean you're supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything. The ones you're talking about don't leave a single, solitary thing beautiful. All that maybe the slightly bet...
...but don't tell me I'm not sensitive to beauty. That's my Achilles' heel, and don't you forget it. To me, everything is beautiful. Show me a pink sunset and I'm limp, by God...
God almighty, Franny," he said. "If you're going to say the Jesus Prayer, at least say it to Jesus, and not to St. Francis and Seymour and Heidi's grandfather all wrapped up in one. Keep him in mind if you say it, and him only, and him as he was and ...
I don’t think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while—just once in a while—there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn't, it's just a disgusting...
I didn't want any degrees if all the ill-read literates and radio announcers and pedagogical dummies I knew had them by the peck.
And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.
He seemed unaware of the messiness of the arrangement.
We don't talk, we hold forth. We don't converse, we expound.
He said you were the only one who was bitter about S.'s suicide and the only one who really forgave him for it. The rest of us, he said, were outwardly unbitter and inwardly unforgiving.
If you can't, or won't, think of Seymour, then you go right ahead and call in some ignorant psychoanalyst. You just do that. You just call in some analyst who's experienced in adjusting people to the joys of television, and Life magazine every Wednes...
The room was not impressively large, even by Manhattan apartment-house standards, but its accumulated furnishings might have lent a snug appearance to a banquet hall in Valhalla.
She was not one for emptying her face of expression.
We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle.
But I was afraid of the questions (much more than the accusations) you might both put to me.
It happens to be one of those days when I see everybody in the family, including myself, through the wrong end of a telescope.
I don't know what good it is to know so much and be smart as whips and all if it doesn't make you happy.
This whole goddamn house stinks of ghosts.
